Patty Jansen is making some ebooks from her author contacts available free during February – the first ebook in several series is available on her blog for download through Amazon, Kindle, KOBO etc… obviously after reading and enjoying, one should return to pay for the subsequent books so that the authors don’t starve!

A really exciting opportunity to sample some great writing.. (check out her blog for some useful authorly hints and tips too)

My good friend and businesswoman Lady Palava has started a small venture using art from myself and a couple of other designers on tshirts, bags etc. I have ordered a couple myself and they’re pretty good quality.

Please message/email me to let me know what you think. If you like the designs but you don’t like spreadshirt, let us know your favourites and we might get some printed with a different company.

If you place an order at Randomesque, email me with your address, letting me know, and I’ll post you a goodybag of postcards, badges, stickers and message cards of our designs for free to say thank you 🙂

To celebrate, (and to celebrate the arrival of the postcards hot off the press from the printer’s this morning), I’m going to send a pack of ten postcards (any design or mix of designs) to the first three people who email me at androktone@hotmail.com.

Like this:

I just finished “Wives and daughters” by Elizabeth Gaskell (for free ebook, see the link below.. it is 700 pages though!)

It was written in the 1860s (she was a contemporary and friend of Charlotte Bronte), but set in 1820. It’s very delicately observed and sweetly felt, and you grow to feel quite indignant on behalf of the long suffering Molly even as you can’t help yourself liking the thoroughly bad and unrepentant Cynthia.

This is a comfortable goose down quilt of a book -the pace is very gentle and you feel lulled and lured into a world of good, kind doctors and clumsy gentleman farmers, ascerbic countesses and gossiping old dears. Mrs Kirkpatrick is a wonderfully shallow character and much gentle fun is poked at her complete lack of self awareness – however she never gets her come-uppance – in fact everybody is redeemed – Mrs Gaskell seems far too kindly to let any of her characters come to harm. Even Preston, the cad, has excuses made for him and behaves in quite a gentlemanly way when finally confronted.

I was saddened to find that this was her last book and she had not managed to finish it before she died, but I think it’s pretty obvious what was going to happen next. I don’t think Molly could cope with many more setbacks before finally getting her man.

There was a sense of how limited and frustrating life was to a girl of reasonable family – ruination lurks in every corner, the only safe activities being the reading of novels like this, and the endless hopeless embroidering of one’s trousseu.

It also made me think how in those days, in most novels there are at least a few characters who “take to their beds” and die of un-diagnosed conditions, rents supported by their parish. Contrast and compare with the way we treat the ill and the poor today.. shame on IDS and ATOS.

I bought this in a charity shop (as the only other reviewer I saw, at Goodreads, said) and it looked as if it would be impenetrable, so I left it for some months before picking it up in a fit of ennui. I wish I had read it earlier – it’s a beautiful, delicate book and it’s introduced me to the poetry of Charlotte Mew, who until then was just a name to me. I am not normally much for poetry but read together with her life story even I cannot fail to see the beauty and strength in her poems, the subtle rhythms and unpredictable patterns, and the way she penetrates to an uncomfortable truth without being twee or strident.
The book attempts to tell her story from her own eyes, based on her correspondance and poems. I don’t know how accurate the depiction of her early life, her awkward sexuality and stunted romances, but it’s compelling reading – feeling, gentle, never lurid. She was born in 1869, one of seven children, three of whom died early and two of who were committed – due to the history of mental illness, she and her surviving sister Anne pledged never to marry. They supported themselves and their mother with their art and writing – unusually for women at that time. But the life was hard, and shortly after Anne died, she went herself to an asylum, where she committed suicide. Poor Charlotte! If she had lived in a different time she would have had more friends, more fame, more love and life.

.. every chapter has a fascinating piece of her poetry, like a jewel.

KEN – by Charlotte Mew

The town is old and very steep

A place of bells and cloisters and grey towers,

And black-clad people walking in their sleep—

A nun, a priest, a woman taking flowers

To her new grave; and watched from end to end

By the great Church above, through the still hours:

But in the morning and the early dark

The children wake to dart from doors and call

Down the wide, crooked street, where, at the bend,

Before it climbs up to the park,

Ken’s is in the gabled house facing the Castle wall.

When first I came upon him there

Suddenly, on the half-lit stair,

I think I hardly found a trace

Of likeness to a human face

In his. And I said then

If in His image God made men,

Some other must have made poor Ken—

But for his eyes which looked at you

As two red, wounded stars might do.

He scarcely spoke, you scarcely heard,

His voice broke off in little jars

To tears sometimes. An uncouth bird

He seemed as he ploughed up the street,

Groping, with knarred, high-lifted feet

And arms thrust out as if to beat

Always against a threat of bars.

And oftener than not there’d be

A child just higher than his knee

Trotting beside him. Through his dim

Long twilight this, at least, shone clear,

That all the children and the deer,

Whom every day he went to see

Out in the park, belonged to him.

“God help the folk that next him sits

He fidgets so, with his poor wits,”

The neighbours said on Sunday nights

When he would go to Church to “see the lights!”

Although for these he used to fix

His eyes upon a crucifix

In a dark corner, staring on

Till everybody else had gone.

And sometimes, in his evil fits,

You could not move him from his chair—

You did not look at him as he sat there,

Biting his rosary to bits.

While pointing to the Christ he tried to say,

“Take it away”.

Nothing was dead:

He said “a bird” if he picked up a broken wing,

A perished leaf or any such thing

Was just “a rose”; and once when I had said

He must not stand and knock there any more,

He left a twig on the mat outside my door.

Not long ago

The last thrush stiffened in the snow,

While black against a sullen sky

The sighing pines stood by.

But now the wind has left our rattled pane

To flutter the hedge-sparrow’s wing,

The birches in the wood are red again

And only yesterday

The larks went up a little way to sing

What lovers say

Who loiter in the lanes to-day;

The buds begin to talk of May

With learned rooks on city trees,

And if God please

With all of these

We, too, shall see another Spring.

But in that red brick barn upon the hill

I wonder—can one own the deer,

And does one walk with children still

As one did here?

Do roses grow

Beneath those twenty windows in a row—

And if some night

When you have not seen any light

They cannot move you from your chair

What happens there?

I do not know.

So, when they took

Ken to that place, I did not look

After he called and turned on me

His eyes. These I shall see—

To read her poems, free: http://www.poemhunter.com/charlotte-mary-mew/

I could not find a free ebook, but it is worth buying: http://www.amazon.co.uk/His-Arms-Full-Broken-Things/dp/0670873152